A clothes treating apparatus such as a clothes dryer or a washing machine having a drying function serves to dry clothes by accommodating clothes into a drum installed in a body, and by supplying blast into the drum. Here, the blast of a high temperature is supplied into the drum to remove moisture of the clothes in a state that the clothes having been completely dehydrated are disposed in the drum. This may cause the clothes tangled with each other to be dried with a lot of wrinkles.
To solve this, there has been proposed a clothes dryer capable of removing wrinkles by supplying steam to clothes having been completely dried.
According to the clothes dryer having a steam supply device, excessive wrinkles may be removed by making the clothes contain a proper amount of moisture by supplying steam to the clothes during a drying process. And, the clothes having been drawn out of the clothes dryer may be in a state suitable for ironing.
The steam supply device of the clothes dryer includes a steam generator having a heater therein, a pump for supplying water into the steam generator, a reservoir for storing water to be supplied into the steam generator, etc. The steam generator is therein provided with a high level sensor and a low level sensor each for sensing a level of supplied water. The pump is operated by a controller based on the water level sensed by the sensors, thereby allowing the steam generator to maintain a water level inside a proper range.
The conventional steam supply device may have the following problems.
Firstly, the conventional steam supply device a complicated structure due to the plurality of components, and have high fabrication costs due to the expensive pump.
Secondly, water leakage may occur at a connection part between the reservoir and the pump.
Thirdly, once water shortage is detected while the steam generator operates, an inner temperature of the steam supply device becomes lower due to a large amount of water which is additionally supplied. This may cause steam generation to be paused.